You can view the complete version 3.0 MPI standard, which runs to a desk-walloping 822 pages in the form of a PDF Report at (MPI Ref) http://www.mpi-forum.org/docs/mpi-3.0/mpi30-report.pdf.
At the time of writing, version 3.1 of the MPI standard is published (June 2015). Although we will be focusing on the previous version, that is 3.0, the differences are not material for our purposes. MPI version 3.0 is both mature and comprehensive.
Due to some of the limitations of R and, in particular, its inherent single-threaded nature, only a subset of the MPI standard is implemented in either Rmpi
or pbdMPI
. However, all the basics for point-to-point and collective group communications are available, and we shall explore these through the remainder of this chapter. To begin, we need to understand some basic concepts that apply to the world of MPI.